


indeed, maybe, again

by boneoft (dovelines)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Sleepy Cuddles, Sleepy Kisses, sue me I’m soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 11:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20063608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dovelines/pseuds/boneoft
Summary: Bucky always showers at HQ after a mission. Sam always looks at him funny, but Bucky has his reasons.





	indeed, maybe, again

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote most of this while either tipsy or sleep deprived, but i cleaned it up and finished it bc i'm determined to finish more things and stevebucky love each other
> 
> title from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPUNg7aNLm4) \-- translated lyrics [here](https://dalshabetglobal.tumblr.com/post/146545536889/), if you're interested!

Bucky always showers at HQ after a mission. Sam always looks at him funny – that brow thing he does when he notices something but won’t comment on it, that mouth thing he does when he thinks Bucky’s caught in some Hydra brain hold-up that won’t get people killed but isn’t healthy, either. Sam can do his brow thing and his mouth thing however much he wants. Bucky’s still going to shower at HQ after a mission.

“Steve can handle a little blood on his carpet sometimes,” Sam says, this time. The bathroom around them is clean white tile and smooth metal fixtures, and their bootprints stick out clear and dark with grit across the floor. It catches Bucky off-guard; he blinks at Sam for long seconds before the words make any kind of sense. Sam faces his locker, stripping out of his BDUs and scrubbing one hand over his cheeks to rub out the hard lines left by his goggles. Bucky’s clothes hang limply from his hands; he stops moving toward the shower. Blinking. Thinking. Trying to be Bucky again.

“Yes,” Bucky says, a full minute later, when Sam is tying his shoes, getting ready to go back to his own apartment and his own shower. Sam doesn’t seem entirely surprised when he looks up at Bucky’s voice and sees him standing there like a lemon; he just watches Bucky with eyebrows slightly raised and that stupid, enduring Wilson solicitude. Bucky’s throat works uncomfortably. The fluorescent lights hum quietly above them -- flickering, but just barely, likely not enough that Sam’s eyes can see it. Bucky’s hand clenches in the fabric of his clean shirt that actually probably used to be Steve’s. 

There’s more words that Bucky wants to say:  _ he can but he shouldn’t have to,  _ or  _ fuck you, Wilson,  _ or  _ this isn’t for him, it’s for me,  _ but his head can’t pick a direction to go so he just stands there, like a damned, defective lemon, with a brain that’s somewhere else or maybe just stupid. 

“Yes?” Sam prompts eventually. Bucky’s whole body jerks.

“Yes,” he says again. He starts back moving towards the shower – not looking at Sam, but they’re both too aware of each other for that to mean anything. It takes pointedly turning on the showerhead to get Sam to sigh again from his spot on the bench, but he does sigh. There’s a rustle of cloth against cloth just barely audible over the water as Sam stands up, but he doesn’t move towards the door like Bucky expects, like he always does when he realizes Bucky isn’t going to listen to his vague psychoanalytical nudges the same way Steve does.

Instead, Sam – rustles again, maybe putting his hands in his pockets – and tells the back of Bucky’s head, “He isn’t going to forget who you were just because you don’t show him.” A laugh startles out of Bucky’s chest – Steve, forget? Bucky,  _ expect  _ him to? Steve holds onto memories like they and spite are still the only things keeping him alive. Steve still remembers when he was six and rich little Dottie Lehrman stole the Binney & Smith eight-pack of crayons it’d taken him two months to save up for. 

Bucky starts peeling out of his BDUs instead of answering; it’s historically been a pretty effective way of getting Sam to shut up, because Sam apparently draws the line at seeing the dick that regularly has sex with Sam’s best friend. This time Sam huffs, sounding loud and painful over the shower water, shifting like he wants to say something else.

Then Bucky drops his underwear to his ankles, and Sam curses Bucky’s ma, and the door squeals like a stuck pig when Sam slams through it.

+

Bucky always showers at HQ after a mission, because Bucky isn’t a damn fool.

As soon as he crosses the threshold to his and Steve’s apartments: he’s done, the day sloughing off of him easy like an old skin. Not even the shower could manage that, no matter how hard he scrubbed with the weird pink loofah that Stark probably gave him as a joke. Just home. Just Steve.

It isn’t so much that work and home don’t mix, or shouldn’t mix – or that Steve couldn’t handle it if Bucky came home with bits of rubble in his hair, or that Bucky thinks coming to Steve with only his soft bits exposed means that Steve will forget how effectively Bucky tried to kill him all those years ago. It’s more for the safety wrapped up in these walls, sweet and sacred. It’s the big clean windows over the river, and a half-finished painting of Natasha in her studio on Steve’s easel, and the familiar way the place looks in the dark.

All the lights are off in the main body of the apartment, but diffuse lamplight comes spilling down the hallway to the bedroom. Bucky follows it easily after shucking his boots next to the door. The wood floor is cold through his socks.

The source of the light is their bedroom, which Bucky knew already, both from the angle and quality and from the fact that it’s far closer to sunrise than it is to sunset. Steve’s asleep when Bucky gets to the door; there’s so many blankets and pillows he practically disappears into the mattress. The bedside lamp stands guard over a copy of some large-print nonfiction monstrosity—Steve probably thought reading it would keep him awake, because Steve is just that much of a nerd.

Steve doesn’t wake as Bucky pads across the room to his side. He barely moves when Bucky settles on the bed, sitting up straight with his feet planted flat on the floor because he still needs a little grounding, maybe. A quiet moment, nothing but the soft whir of the air in the vents and distant traffic and Steve’s little puffs of air under his blankets. Steve needs so many fucking blankets. (Bucky loves him.)

Steve’s skin is sleep-warm and soft where Bucky slides a hand against his stomach, underneath his shirt. He arches into the touch sleepily – makes a sweet little noise – reaches for Bucky with one hand and curls deeper into his pillow with the other. Bucky fits his fingers in the divots of Steve’s ribs, shallower than they used to be but still too clear against his palm.

“Mm,” Steve murmurs, low and quiet like a purr, his eyes still closed. Bucky looks at him in the muted yellow light – his body feels tense and loose all at once, too small to contain every gentle feeling swelling in his chest. “Good mission?”

“Maybe,” Bucky says. People died, but they were mostly the ones trying to kill everyone else. Another Hydra base is gutted and in S.H.I.E.L.D. hands. Bucky even got to rescue a dog at one point: a squirmy little black-and-white terrier that kept licking his neck while he was trying to keep them both from getting shot. He tells Steve about it in fits and starts between Steve’s yawns and the rounded, brimming silences; his hand still rests on Steve’s thin belly and feels him breathe slow and even.

Bucky, guiltily but also not guiltily at all, might be relieved that Steve doesn’t have the serum anymore. That he stays here in the Tower and goes to Parsons a few subway stops away and can only get into normal amounts of trouble when Bucky isn’t around.

Steve stretches again, languidly like a cat, and settles back into the sheets with a contented noise. His arm curls loosely around Bucky’s hips; Bucky rubs his flesh hand up and down Steve’s sternum with more gentleness than Steve would usually allow. Steve’s eyes are  _ still _ closed, because without the serum raring him out of bed at half-five in the morning, Steve’s a son of a bitch about waking up. It’s nice to just look at him, though — to let his eyes slide over the planes of Steve’s face without any blushes and  _ c’mon, Buck, what’re you staring for?  _ to stop him.

“Wanna fuck, Barnes?” 

It shocks a laugh out of Bucky, the same way Sam did earlier, but also different because that is just so  _ Steve _ . 

“Not a romantic bone in your body, is there, Rogers?” 

Steve hums, a very small sound, but his mouth twitches up at the corners like he’s about to be quite pleased with himself. “Nope,” he says, and Bucky groans, half a laugh, already knowing– “But you’re sure a romantic, and I know you’ve got a bone you could put in me.”

Bucky can’t take it. He can’t. He grabs Steve around his little waist and pulls him shrieking from his nest of blankets to drop (gently, gently, he’s got soft bones and thin skin) onto the carpet and wrestle him flat and squish him with his body. Steve squirms and laughs and runs his hands through Bucky’s hair where it’s still just a little damp from the shower; they’re nose-to-nose and Steve’s in Bucky’s shadow but his eyes are open now, and bright, and Bucky loves him, loves him, loves him.

“Hey,” Bucky says, a little soft, a lot dumb.

“Hey yourself,” Steve says, and kisses him.

They lie there for a while, just kissing, reacquainting themselves with each other’s mouths. Steve tastes very faintly like toothpaste; he makes a small rumbly noise when Bucky bites his lower lip, and Bucky can feel Steve’s stupidly long eyelashes brushing against the upper curve of his cheek.

Right now, Bucky doesn’t want to fuck, not really. Not with Steve feeling so languid and sleepy under him. He kind of just wants to lay all of his weight on Steve — to tuck him up and keep him safe against his ribcage and never go on another mission again. But Steve’s lungs couldn’t take that, and also Bucky isn’t dumb enough to think that would keep him out of trouble anyway.

The kissing devolves into just touching, and then just breathing, and then Steve yawns hugely and sighs hot air all over Bucky’s face. His eyes are drooping again already; he keeps twisting his hands jerkily through Bucky’s hair as if the motion will keep him awake instead of the other way around. Bucky kisses him once more, quick on the cheek, and then sits up and pulls Steve with him like a particularly sharp-elbowed rag doll. He huffs as he does it: one emphatic  _ oof _ , just to make Steve laugh.

“Age catching up with you, old man?” he says, climbing back into bed where Bucky’s holding up all his blankets. Bucky expects him to be asleep the instant his head hits the pillow, but Steve squirms around like he can’t get comfortable.

“No more’n yours is, punk.” Bucky flicks off the lamp before padding around to his side of the bed in the near-darkness. (They’re old, aren’t they? Born over a century ago and still holding on. One day they’ll retire — again, for real: go back to the farm that T’Challa updates him on sometimes, when it’s time to take in the hay or when there’s new babies in the herd. Find peace.)

For now, though: his civvies strip off easily and go in the hamper, because Winifred Barnes didn’t raise a slob, and Bucky climbs into bed in just his briefs and undershirt. Immediately Steve tucks up against him — small, warm, with cold hands pressed up against Bucky’s stomach. Heat-seeking missile, his guy is, but Bucky runs hot enough for the both of them.

“Are you needed in the morning?” Steve whispers, and kisses the ball of Bucky’s shoulder almost absent-mindedly, just because it’s within reach. Bucky fishes one of Steve’s hands out from under his clothes and brings it up to his mouth to kiss. The shape of Steve is just visible, and his eyes catch the city lights, two bright points in the quiet.

“No,” Bucky tells him, low, because it feels like the whole room is dampened now. “The day after.”

Steve’s hand pats sleepily at his face; he’s already slipping back under. “Good,” he mumbles, digs his chin into Bucky’s collarbone, and lets out a deep, comfortable sigh. Bucky almost laughs. He’s laughed a lot today.

“Good night,” he murmurs, a little bemused. The hum he gets in response vibrates against his skin; Steve curls closer against him, warm, solid, safe and safety.

Bucky closes his eyes and sleeps without dreaming.


End file.
